Category: The Nightmares

Sometimes, the the best things you can do while you’re on the road are things you would ordinarily do at home anyway. In our nation’s capital over 4th of July weekend, we delayed a side-trip to Annapolis because we could not tear ourselves away from this year’s epic Wimbledon men’s final (which lasted over five hours including rain delays). We had no choice but to just sit there all day on the couch, glued to the wide-screen TV.

McEnroe was beside himself in the booth, and it was clear that this was one for the ages. Afterwards, when he went down to the locker area to interview the players, McEnroe was completely lit up by what we had all just witnessed — the ferocious and transcendent quality of the tennis on display, even up to the bitter end. He was gushing like a little kid.

Eventually he asked Federer, who was ever-gracious in defeat (one gets the impression that Federer and the equally gracious Nadal actually like and respect each other) if there was any consolation in knowing that he had just participated in what was arguably the greatest final in Wimbledon history. Federer smiled a kind of sick, sad smile and I don’t even remember what he answered. But in any case it was clear that the real answer was “no,” that there was no consolation at all in fighting that hard only to come up a whisker short.

And I thought of the many equivalent sporting events I’ve seen over the years, and I’ve always had the exact same feeling as Johnny Mac — that when you play in one of those it should offset the disappointment of losing. It should be more than enough just to have engaged in such a thrillingly high level of competition. That’s certainly how I would feel if it were me. (I am perhaps a bit too comfortable in seeing things from the loser’s perspective.) But of course to the Federers of this world, it’s not nearly enough. Champions play to win; it’s part of what makes them champions. Yet another stunningly obvious life-lesson I had never quite figured out before.

To help me sort it all out later, I was thankful for the company of Harriet The Spy:

I WILL NEVER FORGET THAT FACE AS LONG AS I LIVE. DOES EVERYBODY LOOK THAT WAY WHEN THEY HAVE LOST SOMETHING? I DON’T MEAN LIKE LOSING A FLASHLIGHT. I MEAN DO PEOPLE LOOK LIKE THAT WHEN THEY HAVE LOST?

And to top it all off, an aptly themed romantic melodrama from the Nightmares playbook.

Perfume

The Nightmares

Hear the glasses clinking in the air
When I reach for one, well it’s not there
I light the room with candles one by one
I’ll burn a lot more things before I’m done

I was stranded, a dirty roadside
Stuck out my thumb and caught a ride
Ended up in an old saloon
The ceiling fans whirled me across the room

They sang, all that’s left of you is just a little perfume
All that’s left of you is just a little perfume

Well, I heard you were asking Danny how I was
That’s very kind, thank you very much
I do the crossword puzzle in the New York Times
But I can still remember different times

I was frightened, a dirty roadside
Hit my knees and there I cried
Later on I was in your room
The bottles on the dresser played forgotten tunes

They played, all that’s left of you is just a little perfume
All that’s left of you is just a little perfume

All that’s left of you
All that’s left of you dear darlin’ is the smell of your perfume

Driving into Portland, Maine the other night in a torrential downpour I couldn’t help but be reminded of my first visit to Portland, years ago. Kris Woolsey’s grandmother lived there, and his nuclear family was convening for a long weekend at her house in the woods.

We flew up on the renegade 80s airline, People Express, armed with a couple of fifths of Stolichnaya. I remember we had to wait for over an hour on the runway while President Reagan conducted some of his nasty business at Newark Airport, so I was passed out cold before we even took off. I don’t recall Kris’s family being too overjoyed to meet me.

It was a strange and tense weekend, and I kept pretty much to myself and my guitar. After everyone went to bed, I would raid the liquor cabinet and talk on the phone with my girlfriend, Mary, back in New York, then stay up all night reading. And somewhere in there were a few too-bright-and-too-early canoe trips and other awkward lake-style adventures. (I think things loosened up a bit after Kris’s family left, and we were just hanging out with his grandmother, who was cool. I remember her showing us the harbor and all the little islands that dot the Casco Bay, and even then I was awed at the sight.)

Anyhow, the flight home was even worse than the flight up — a huge, terrifying thunderstorm and an interminable delay. We sat nervously sipping Manhattan after Manhattan in the little airport lounge there, staring out glumly as waves of water crashed against the windows and I silently prayed for the flight to be cancelled. I was sure we were all going to die.

I wrote this song in my head wandering home drunk after work one night — from 97th and Madison to the East Village. Sometimes when you have a band, it makes it easy to write this way — what’s playing in your head will somehow be pre-tailored to the musicians’ individual styles and strengths, anticipating what everyone will do with their parts. Or rather, everyone’s styles and strengths will inform (and dictate to a certain extent) what’s playing in your head. At any rate, it’s distinctly different from going in with just chords and a melody and working it out.

The verses were my sincere attempt to write a love-that-nobody-else-understands song, a sideways homage to Kirsty MacColl’s “They Don’t Know” which I played endlessly in those days. (That would be the Tracy Ullman version, of course — I had barely heard of Kirsty MacColl back then.) I found the notion of unsanctioned romance utterly captivating. I did not know then what I know now, which is that if no one you know approves of your paramour it’s usually because he or she is bad news or the relationship is wildly unhealthy. (Though there are exhilarating exceptions, god knows, and thank god for that.)

The chorus was meant as a semi-joke: a list of over-the-top romantic attributes followed by a verbal shrug. I vaguely had in mind the famous scene in “Caddyshack” where Bill Murray talks about caddying for the Dalai Lama and being given the gift of total consciousness on his deathbed in lieu of a tip. As virtually everyone reading this already knows, Bill tries to play off his bragging with typicallly masterful nonchalance and says something like, “So I got that going for me, which is nice.”

Everybody’s Gotta Have Something

People talking about you, baby
Saying you’re no good
I pay no attention, darling
Though I probably should

‘Cause I see something special
When I look into your eyes
I see a burning pool of fire
And a love that never dies
And everybody’s gotta have something

All the things that they’re saying, darling
I don’t wanna hear
I’ll meet you in the Marlin, baby
And we could have a beer

And we could sit in the back and they’d leave us alone
For a little while
‘Cause nothing’s ever wrong when I’m holding your hand
And I see you smile

I’m more than a little abashed at having posted so much inane blather about my songwriting “process” the other day. And of course, I couldn’t help but remember more innocent times, when committing to a song was not such a matter of sturm und drang.

The Real Thing (Trad.)

The Nightmares

It’s the real thing
In the back of your mind
What you’re hoping to find
Whoa, yeah, it’s the real thing
(Coca-Cola is coke!)

We were sitting around Gideon Rosen’s parent’s house in Larchmont, where, as fate would have it, there happened to be a guitar and, you guessed it, a copy of a certain magazine sitting on the coffee table. And, not only did we consider this a proper song, but as is evidenced below, we actually paid real money to record it in a proper studio.

Mary and I had just split up and I was a drunken, zombified wreck, beyond misery, when Ned casually slipped Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice” into a Nightmares rehearsal. At the time, things were strained between me and Ned, and we could barely stand to be in the same room together.

I learned the song, but it wasn’t until later on that I realized his intent hadn’t been so completely casual after all. I think he was looking out for me, in his way, and whether that’s true or not, singing this song night after night definitely helped clear out my head and bring me back to the world of the living.

Sometimes the kindest exchanges between two people are the small, silent gestures made when things have degenerated so badly that civil conversation is next to impossible.

“Harold” was a term we used as shorthand for appreciating those all-too-common situations that betray the handiwork of a sadistically ironic god. “That’s so Harold,” we might say, shaking our heads over our cocktail glasses. Or simply, “Uh-oh, Harold!”

I say “we,” but really there were only three people I know who used the term this way: Me, Jon Frankel and Bill Arning. I think at first we were making fun of a Times book review that used the word “Haroldian” to describe something in a play by Harold Pinter. And knowing very little about Pinter or his oeuvre back then, we may have believed that mordant irony was the defining characteristic of his work. (I still know very little of Pinter’s writing, and for all I know that actually may well be its defining characteristic. Or not.)

Anyhow, the term soon took on a life of its own, having absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Pinter. “Harold” became just “Harold.” And for those weeks-on-end where one’s life became a boiling cauldron of sadistic irony, one could say that “Harold” had moved in.

“Puppies” was written on 109th Street, utter living room nonsense, as the lyrics certainly attest. But of course, sometimes it’s easier to sing nonsense with heartfelt sincerity than it is to resist singing lyrics that cut closer to the bone with affected detachment. The song became a Nightmares live staple, and allowed Reno to execute one of the trickiest maneuvers in all of rockdom: a short and tasteful drum solo.

Puppies

The Nightmares

I woke up on Moday morning
Without any warning
Hey hey hey

And when I went to bed that night
You know I woke up with such a fright
Hey hey hey

‘Cause if the puppies don’t bring the shoes home
If the puppies don’t bring the shoes home
If the puppies don’t bring the shoes
Well, hey hey hey

I was watching television
Trying to make a big decision
Hey hey hey

I was writing with a pen and paper
Trying to compose a criminal caper
Hey hey hey

‘Cause if the puppies don’t bring the shoes home
If the puppies don’t bring the shoes home
If the puppies don’t bring the shoes
Well, hey hey hey

I was killing myself with pennies
Pretty soon you know I didn’t have any
Hey hey hey

And then Harold came to stay
It doesn’t matter what the people say
Hey hey hey

‘Cause if the puppies don’t bring the shoes home
If the puppies don’t bring the shoes home
If the puppies don’t bring the shoes
Well, hey hey hey

People talk all the time about how this or that obscure pop song is “an alternate-universe hit single.” And God knows, Larchmont, where I spent my high school years, was nothing if not an alternate universe, with its own decadent manners & mores and its own spit-and-bailing-wire soundtrack. In other words, it was not unlike many affluent, drugged-out, psycho suburbs at the waning of the putrid ’70s.

Matthew Tolley was a huge star and catalyst in that universe, for all the same reasons that he could barely scrape together a life in this one. He hated me at the end, and when I went to his memorial service I hadn’t spoken to him in over ten years. The final straw was The Nightmares recording his song, “Trudy” — which, after Ned’s “I Could Never Know You,” is perhaps Larchmont’s all-time greatest hit. Matthew saw that as the ultimate betrayal, and he was furious.

“Trudy” was a very sad, simple song Matthew wrote about a girl named Trudy he had met and fallen madly in love with when he was in the mental hospital. Like all of Matthew’s songs, “Trudy” mainly existed in the alternate-universe ether, but it was something everyone I knew at the time could sing by heart — from depressed little freshman girls at our high school to members of Blondie.

It’s stunning to think that the only actual physical artifact of this song was Matthew’s original alone-in-my-bedroom-casette, and I can still remember people sitting around Matthew and his cheap little tape recorder, in awe of the song and of the atmosphere he conjured so simply — and of a spirit no one gathered there could ever hope to replicate.

“Matthew Tolley wrote one song, Trudy. He never intended to do anything with it, but it was his song, and it was perfect. He had met Trudy in the madhouse when he was in high school. Other than that, I don’t know who Trudy was. But I’m sure it was the purest form of Devastationalist crush. He wrote a simple, punky love song to a girl he didn’t really know, but for whom he had the deepest feelings of love. Matthew was a sort of damned Idealist, a Gnostic stranded in mortality.

He was obsessed with both innocence and its loss. His loss of innocence in the madhouse left him without anything at all, except for a sense of humour. He worshipped fame, fallen fame. Suicides and nervous breakdowns. Hollywood Babylon stuff. He was in love with the story where he was Patty Duke collapsing on the beach in “Valley of the Dolls.”

When we were first living together on First Avenue he got a few boxes of codeine cough syrup and a giant bottle of Phenobarbital. The cough syrup was okay, but it had a decongestant and it dried out your nasal passages till you started to wheeze. Matthew drank it on the rocks. Sometimes he washed the phenobarbitol down with it, sometimes he went to Mudd with Eloise and swallowed the pills down with booze. He managed it for several weeks but one morning I awoke to the phone. It was his mother asking if he was there and if so, was he awake? He had called his psychiatrist and asked, “What happens if you swallow a hundred Phenobarbital?”

I got off the phone and started dragging him around by the lapels to keep him conscious till the EMT guys arrive. They came in with a gurney and some smelling salts. When I told them what Matthew had said to his psychiatrist they were contemptuous. But later when they pumped his stomach there were forty undigested pills in it. The nurse said to us when we went to visit, “Your friend pulled the tube out of his nose. So they put a catheter up in his penis.” Matthew was mortified.

He saved me some of the bread they gave him at the hospital. It came in a plastic bag and was ageless. It hung on our Christmas tree for nine years.”

Trudy (Matthew Tolley)

The Nightmares

Trudy, you know I love you
And though you’re still there
I really don’t care

‘Cause Trudy, it’s what you do to me
You nearly blind me
Must be your beauty

I don’t generally advocate weeping in public places, but if one were to insist on shedding tears in public, I can think of no better place to do it than on a long train ride in the dead of winter. Listening to music, head against the grimy window, looking out as endless bleak landscapes roll by. It’s really the ideal setting. And actually, if you think about it, it’s kind of a miracle that everyone on trains isn’t sitting there sobbing, that entire train cars aren’t loaded up with people bawling their damned fool eyes out.

The heartbreakingly faithful Johnny Johnson, who in the late 1980s led The Siddeleys into total obscurity, says this:

“It was as if we were swimming against a tide that changed direction whenever we tried to swim for another shore. There was no way through, no matter how true our compass points were. Buffeted by impossible waves, we began to tire. The walls inverted and suddenly I was on the outside again, a refugee from the Tower of Babel as the people who shared our language faded away like ghosts.

What an irritating paradox. A real outsider will always remain outside, doomed by their very nature. After all, once they’re on the inside, how can you ever be sure that they meant it, that they were what they appeared to be from the other side of the wall?”

Shane McGowan adds:

“The most important thing to remember about drunks is that drunks are far more intelligent than non-drunks. They spend a lot of time talking in pubs, unlike workaholics who concentrate on their careers and ambitions, who never develop their higher spiritual values, who never explore the insides of their head like a drunk does.”

This world is decidedly hard on those who bypass the banquet in order that they might more slowly savor instead life’s divine little crumbs. One begins to wonder if maintaining an interior life is worth the trouble.

This is The Nightmares performing “Little Things,” live at CBGBs. I wrote this song on a two-string guitar and an out-of-tune piano in Jon Frankel’s mother’s living room in Larchmont, one stoned and sunny afternoon when everybody was out of the house for some reason. (Though the breakdown is all Nightmares, of course.) And I also ought to point out that the chorus of this song contains the most audacious appropriation I ever made — melody, lyrics and vocal inflection lifted whole from a couplet in a song (a flat-out masterpiece, at that) by the indomitable Pointers Sisters.

Little Things

The Nightmares

I want you to take a vow
Oh, won’t you do that for me?
It’s very simple, this is how
Just cross your heart complacently

I guess I don’t understand
I’ll do what I came here for and go
It’s gotten so out of hand
But there’s one thing you should know
Each time I open up my heart
It seems to just get torn apart
That’s why I want to remember those little things

I want you to follow me
It’s not too far, just down the street
There’s something there you ought to see
Some people I think you should meet

I guess I don’t understand
I’ll get what I came here for and go
It’s gotten so out of hand
But there’s one thing you should know
Each time I open up my heart
It seems to just get torn apart
That’s why I want to remember those little things

All I want to remember
All I want to remember, baby
All I want to remember are those little things

Mary was a real girl. At the time, too real for me, alas. It was Kristian Hoffman who urged me to use real names in my songs. He had a song called “Suddenly I Know a Lot of Dead People” where he sang, “I never thought, I never knew/Anders and Allison, to name just two.” Anders and Allison were, of course, two real dead people that he knew — or had known, I guess you should say. (I knew them too. Allison used to change my guitar strings for me.)

I have no idea what might have been going through Mary’s mind the million times she saw The Nightmares perform this song. I do know that on the very few occasions I’ve watched people sing songs that I knew were about me, I felt extremely uncomfortable, dizzy to the point of nausea. (I’ve heard that an aversion to “taking it” is not uncommon among disher-outers.)

But then, I would always say that this song wasn’t really about her. I just used her name. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but listening to this song now, it seems to me that what it’s really about is getting wasted and listening to The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society nonstop for a week.

Mary

The Nightmares

I know someday we will laugh about this thing
And I know someday we’ll be better
But until that day can be
We’ll be all right, just you see

And Mary, whatever you want to do
It’s all right with me
And Mary, wherever you want to go
It’s all right with me
And Mary, whoever you want to see
It’s all right with me
And Mary, whatever you want to wear

I hope someday we’ll be smarter than we are
And I hope someday we are better
But until that day can be
We’ll be all right, just you see

And Mary, whatever you want to do
It’s all right with me
And Mary, wherever you want to go
It’s all right with me
And Mary, whoever you want to see
It’s all right with me
And Mary, however you wear your hair